salamander

A view of the mostly-complete southern half of the intersection mural - photo by Yuki

We enjoyed another great talk by Mark Lakeman of Portland’s City Repair last Friday night, and on Saturday we were inspired by their example to paint a new intersection repair mural.

These photos are worth many thousands of words – thanks to Kathy Hill and Yuki Kidokoro for documenting the event!

We had a lot of help from the youth of the neighborhood - Jennifer (in red) did a lot of great work - and that's me on the right - Photo by Kathy

Young eco-villager Jean Michel prepping the area before painting

Another very hard-working neighborhood youth named Mohammed, he has just finished outlining that triangle in purple - photo by Kathy

Adonia and Christopher putting down our new crosswalks - photo by Kathy

There’s a lot to say about it… and a lot more folks that did a lot of work whose picture I didn’t get in to this quick blog entry. I am still exhausted and have other work to catch up on… so this blog entry is all too brief, and hopefully others can help fill in more details in comments, etc.

The central wheel of the design is based on a bicycle wheel, extending its spokes into a circle design about 15 feet across - photo by Yuki

Josie at work on the northern part of the mural which features a water swirl design that commemorates the historical waters of Arroyo de la Sacatela and the Bimini Slough

Kwanwoo did a lot of excellent detail lettering in this, the northmost section, which featured a commemoration of the railroad tracks in our street which conveyed the H-line streetcars.

Earlier Eco-Village blog articles in anticipation of this event here1, here2, and here3.

There’s excellent event coverage over at Homegrown Evolution. (Check out the comments there… looks like the new crosswalks we painted look almost too official!)

Eco-Villager Adonia Lugo has more excellent coverage here, including much better descriptions of the railway section where she and Bobby took the lead. She and contrasts how different parts of L.A. approach their common spaces.

Here’s a link to Kathy’s photo gallery on Picassa and to Yuki’s photo album on Facebook. (I am not 100% sure that these are completely available to the public… if they don’t work for you, email us and we’ll see what we can do.)

At the end of the day we painted handprints and footprints of all the folks who worked on the mural. Here's Mark Lakeman getting his foot painted blue, so he can print it on our new crosswalk. Photo by Yuki

Jimmy, Josie, Lara, Doran, Melba, Angie (youth from Bresee) and I put our heads together and came up the rough scheme for the intersection repair mural that we’ll all be painting on Saturday September 12th. For more information about the event, as some photos of the previous intersection repair mural, see this earlier post.

Here’s the basic idea:

The Planned Mural Design

It will have a central circle based on a bicycle wheel. Wrapped around that will be a salamander/lizard. Where the crosswalks go, we’ll be doing lighter colors. In the crosswalk, participants will paint their footprints. Along the lizard, we’ll be writing welcome in multiple languages (likely at least Spanish, English, Korean, and Bangladeshi.) Extending from this will be stylized swirling pattern representing waters. Most of the details will be worked out in the street in chalk on September 12th.

This all grew out of an in inital salamander sketch of Jimmy’s, that has been brainstormed on top of here:

Initial Salamander Sketch

We wanted the creature to help delineate the crosswalks, so we ended up swirling her/him more like this:

Salamander Configuration

These are blurry cell phone pictures… but perhaps they’re enough to communicate the basic ideas. The actual drawings are taped up in the lobby of 117 Bimini Place. If you have suggestions, ideas, etc., please let us know what you’d like to see.